Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique when a service is provided with use of a Web Intents mechanism or the like.
Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, when processing is delegated between websites, a function calling side has had to know how to call a function such as an Application Programming Interface (API) or a Representative State Transfer (REST) interface of a function provider side. Therefore, the function calling side has had to perform processing of the calling side according to each calling rule to realize cooperation with a different website. Further, authentication to the function provider side is often required to allow the function calling side to use the function. Therefore, the function user side has had to hold authentication information of the function provider side or use an authentication foundation such as Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). However, holding the authentication information leads to the necessity of correctly and safely managing the authentication information, and use of the authentication foundation such as SAML requires establishment of an agreement in advance between the function provider and the function user. These requirements have imposed a burden on the function user.
There are also mechanisms that realize cooperation with an arbitrary web service (or a web application) without requiring using a special API. As one example thereof, there is proposed a mechanism called Web Intents that loosely couples a service receiver side and a service provider side by late runtime binding to realize cooperation there between.
As a conventional technique, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2012-48457 discusses a technique according to which a web browser notifies a cooperation target website of information about a cooperation source website with use of a script such as a bookmarklet. The cooperation target acquires data from the cooperation source with use of the notified information.
The technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2012-48457 does not take a new cooperation mechanism such as Web Intents into consideration at all. If authentication information of the cooperation source website is required when the cooperation target website acquires data from the cooperation source website, the cooperation target has to know the authentication information of the cooperation source in advance, or a mechanism for sharing authentication such as SAML is required. Therefore, there is such a problem that the cooperation target cannot provide a service to an arbitrary cooperation source.
According to the new cooperation mechanism such as Web Intents, a user agent (UA) processes a Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) document that contains a markup for registering a provided function to use the provided function offered by a service in this mechanism. The UA can request execution of the provided function by connecting to the service with use of a Web Intent corresponding to the provided function to be offered by the service, which is registered with the UA. However, even in the Web Intents mechanism, a user has to, for example, configure various kinds of settings and edit a service content via the UA when the provided function is requested. Therefore, various modifications to improve usability will be demanded from now on regarding a request to the service using this Web Intent and registration of the Web Intent.